Bed and Breakfast

This is it. A hundred yards from the bus-stop past the thirties terrace and the row of boarded-up shops you find the place. It’s not what you expected although on reflection it’s hard to say what kind of expectations you had. It’s a house or rather a row of houses knocked into one shapeless dwelling. Ugly yellow brick badly repointed; new aluminium window-frames crookedly inserted in place of the old. Mount Olympus Hotel inscribed on the stained awning above the entrance and a handwritten sign in the window saying Rooms Vacant. A short flight of steps to the door.

After a moment’s hesitation you lift the sleeping child from the pushchair and climb the steps. You ring the bell. A faint whirr and click from the intercom. You state your name and purpose. After a few seconds, the door opens, as if by unseen hands.

“Come on,” you say to the older child, who waits below in the street.

“Are we here now?” she says with a frown.

Inside, you find the proprietor in his hot little den.

He takes his time reading the letter you’ve brought (he has lots of time) turning the paper round and round. He raises his slow eyes, picking his teeth with a forefinger. He considers you.

In the room with the yellow wood-veneer walls you stand like conspirators in an atmosphere thick with cigarette smoke. The two-bar electric fire gives off a powerful smell of searing plastic.

Apparently satisfied, he nods. The crown of his head is smooth, with a few strands of oiled hair. He lifts a key off a board. You follow him into the passage, under the listless gaze of the pin-up on the wall, whose glistening body seems jacknifed under the weight of enormous breasts.

In the lounge a group of women and one man are smoking and watching TV. Children play on the worn carpet at their feet. As you pass through into the narrow cubicle beyond, eyes flicker away from the glaring screen and back again.

The walls of the kitchen are blackened with smoke from a recent fire. A notice prohibits cooking after 9pm. On the draining-board sits an electric kettle, chained to the wall.

In the yard outside, a bare strip of concrete with a wire clothesline, is a broken child’s swing.

There’s a different texture to everything. You notice it at first. After a while it’s harder to see it. You see it first in the bathroom that day, as he shows you round the place. It’s something to do with the way the ridges of the floorboards show through the worn black and white linoleum. The way the window doesn’t quite close. There’s a gritty film around the inside of the chipped enamel bath a quarter of the way up and a sprinkling of Vim on the bottom, as if someone had made an attempt to clean it out and had given up halfway, foiled by the hopelessness of the venture.

In the plughole beneath the broken chain is a shiny clot of human hair, so thickly meshed it defies extraction. On the mirror flecks of toothpaste, blood and snot. Remorseless winter light glitters on the dust on the sill. The frosted glass has a pattern of cobwebs.

Decoration in the WC is more flamboyant. Long smears of shit swirl up the wall almost to head-height, a motif echoed by the furry skid-marks in the pan, where a single cigarette-butt floats.

You can feel this special texture everywhere. It’s in the feel of the carpet in the room where you sit down to wait. Between the beds the surface is greasy, tracked smooth by countless feet.

There’s the sound of a key in the lock.

“Is this it, then?”

“It looks like it, doesn’t it?”

Texture. The black grit that creeps under the loose window-frame. The oily rasp of blankets against nylon sheets, where you lie in a network of static, that first night, listening to the passing traffic.

After a while you stop counting the days and weeks and notice only that the season has, almost imperceptibly, changed.

It’s hot in the room which smells of dirt, stale food and babies’ nappies. Sun comes in through the half-closed venetian blind, striping the walls with alternate bars of light and shadow.

The child jumps up and down, chanting.

“Crash. Splash. Crash. I’m in the seaside, Mum, I’m in the seaside.”

Sounds of traffic float up from the street. It’s a dry well filled with dust and flies and torn paper, circling.

“Crash. Splash. Look at me, Mum. I’m in the seaside.”

The child jumps and splashes in invisible waves. Drifts of sand cover the sheets, the floor, the bed, in the room where you sit, marooned.

You walk into the kitchen. The thin black woman stands at the cooker, stirring something in a pan. Her friend sits at the table, smoking a cigarette. From time to time she brushes away flakes of ash from the front of her dress. You catch the end of a conversation.

“…three bedrooms. A garden.”

They fall silent. The pregnant girl at the table turns the pages of her newspaper. You open the fridge and remove a carton of milk. As you leave the room they resume their interrupted talk.

“My sister, she only wait four month. They offer her a lovely lickle house. Fitted kitchen. Through lounge. All that.”

It’s the same conversation you hear everywhere, in different forms. Houses. Property. The cost of property. The cost of living. In the launderette that afternoon or another the Irish manageress hands you change for the machines without breaking the thread of her discourse.

“My daughter’s just been offered a beautiful place. Her and the kiddies. Three bedrooms. Nice little garden.”

Her friend, a woman with hair bleached at the tips and a lined, smoker’s face, nods encouragement.

“Nice…”

“So I said to her, don’t you go telling him the address. That’s all you want. Him turning up like the bad penny…”

You unpack the wad of dirty clothes, thrusting it into the big steel drum. You slot the change in and sit down to wait. It’s quiet in here, like a church. Women fold clean warm sheets and swap cigarettes. You watch the soapsuds go round and round in the glass porthole, mesmerised by your own helplessness.

The grainy light cast by the single bulb on its long flex shows up the smears on the wall by the bed, the pattern of leaves or flickering flames in the filthy carpet. Someone has dragged their fingers through the dust on the mirror, leaving long scars.

“How did we end up here? That’s what I want to know.”

“How do we get out of here, you mean.”

“We’ll never get out of here.”

You sit in the quiet and listen to the murmur of voices in the next room and in the room next to that. Sometimes it seems as if all these sounds come from the walls themselves, an accumulation of all the human presences that have slept here, eaten here, made love here, fought here and finally, left here.

“Did you phone them?”

“Yes, I phoned them. Waiting list’s closed. Phone back in six months.”

“Six months, a year. What difference does it make? We’ll never get out of here.”

On the mirror of the old-fashioned dressing-table next to the wardrobe full of clashing wire hangers a previous tenant of the room has left a transfer of exotic birds. Birds of paradise, parakeets, humming-birds. The face in the mirror, a wan ghost, appears among brightly coloured outspread wings.

“What did you say?”

“I said it’s a life sentence. They put you here and forget about you.”

The formica surface of the table is intricately scarred with burns. The tin ashtray shows a painted view of an Italian lakeside scene. Blue water, blue sky. A white church among green trees. Red-tiled roofs.

The room grows dark around you. Lights from passing cars move across the ceiling in a wide arc. The children stir in their sleep.

There’s a mark on the wall by the bed, as if too many fingers have touched it, restless in the dark. Somewhere in the crowded airless building the TV is turned up loud. Through the partitions you can hear people moving about. Footsteps on the stairs, a slammed door.

From the street comes the sound of raised voices, a shout of laughter. People are returning home from the pubs and the all-night takeaways.

You close your eyes. You try to sleep. On the side of the wardrobe nearest the bed your fingers trace the outline of an inscription. Home Sweet Home. Beneath it, someone has scratched a name, a date, in the dark varnish.

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This story was first published in New Socialist in 1987, during the last-but-one recession, and is ‘drawn from life’, as it were. I thought of dedicating it to George Osborne, but then realised its ironies might be lost on a man who believes that being poor is a ‘lifestyle choice’.